Samsung S3 4G LTE KitKat 4.4.4 update (Finland)

Post date: Jan 24, 2015 6:22:26 AM

Interesting update as usual, lol. First of all it took forever before it was delivered over OTA to Finland. The change log as usual lacked tons of important things. Which doesn't surprise me, changelogs are usually just big marketing lies, unless it's about some very well managed open source project.

Unnecessary software was added to phone as usual:

Samgsung uPic

Google Drive

Google Play Movies & TV

HP Print Service Plugin

Samsung Print Service Plugin

Other changes:

Alarm clock widged stopped working..

Some widgets won't work anymore at all and some got removed completely not available anymore.

UI is slightly different.

Top of screen status bar icon's don't use colors anymore.

My own impression is that phone seems bit more responsive in general.

Gallery share now works. Previous version always immediately crashed when I tried to share any photos. Now it seems to be working again.

It remains to be seen in the email client has been fixed. Earlier it got really ridiculously sluggish after being used for a some time.

Now it places space at end of words or doesn't place at all. Earlier it inserted space at start of words, so it was much easier to delete or change words. As well as all manually inserted punctuations are incorrectly placed with leading and trailing space . like this , Isn't it great . ifautospacingisdisabledwellthentheendresultislikethis. Auto punctuate does work as supposed, because it erases the leading space before putting the period. As far as I know the learned data for the keyboard got cleared, not a biggie but still bit annoying. New version is also really especially bad with Finnish language. If I first write word test and then just go back and ing to make it testing, it learns test and ing separately. Of course I would like it to recognize whole testing as one word in future. So yeah, it's really bad. You can't modify endings of long words unless you'll write the whole word again.

Or maybe this is how they want to people write. You'll write test and ing separately to make testing. Might work for some languages pretty well, but in Finnish the base part of might also change slightly so editing the end and storing it as whole works better than separating one word to multiple individual segments.

For some reason not all applications are visible in Apps menu nor in installed applications. You might think that this would mean that the applications won't exist. Well, but when you have some of the applications linked as default app to launch with some action, those do still start. But there's no other way to find, launch or remove those apps. (?) Any tips about this?

Warning! In newer Android version (KitKat) OS limits the 3rd party apps (non preinstalled on the device) to access external USB flash or SD card write function. - So this kind of cripples SD card usability for many purposes.

And the list of official changes:

OS upgrade - KitKat OS 4.4.4

Music Album art will be displayed on the lock screen while playing music.

The new launcher setting menu has been added. - Home Screen, SMS.

Camera shortcut is added in the Lock screen.

Improved the User Interface and stability.

Some changes may vary depending on country or network operator.

After updating, you will not be able to downgrade to the old software because of updates to the security policy.

Other things to notice:

Update takes more than one hour, can take up to two hours.

Installation itself takes about 15 minutes.

Wondered why the download was so slow, even if seemed being served by CloudFront.

That's it for now. I'll update this list when and if I find some meaningful differences. After all changes are quite small, only major drawback is the new Samsung keyboard version if you're using continuous mode. Some discussion about this update at Google+.